BY: AISHA ILYAD
“Those photos were meant just for the two of us. Breaking up with him didn’t give him the right to deliberately humiliate me.”
Not all relationships last forever, as evidenced by your two friends who can no longer be in the same room as each other after their tumultuous breakup in a TGIFridays. On the breakup scale, a couple’s decision to separate can fall anywhere from a one (let’s remain really good friends) to a 10 (let’s destroy each others lives). And while most breakups fall somewhere in the middle, there are some that turn just plain cruel.
Revenge porn, also known as nonconsensual pornography, is the distribution and publication of one or more sexually explicit materials portraying someone, without the subject’s permission, and with the intent to cause them distress. The photo may be one that the victim took themselves and shared with the eventual poster, a photo taken by someone else (usually an ex-partner or lover), or an image taken from the victim’s computer or device by a hacker. The victims are overwhelmingly female, and the damage done to their reputations and psyches can be enormous.
There are many revenge porn sites that feature nude and sexual photos of people, mostly women, often posted by their ex-spouses or ex-lovers. A number of websites host these images. Many sites include identifying details, such as the person’s full name, employer and hometown, as well as links to the person’s Facebook or other personal webpages, plus nasty comments. Although some revenge porn sites have been shut down, new sites pop up all the time. Images can also be easily picked up by other websites, and content that is widely distributed on the Internet is difficult to remove. So, even if a person succeeds in getting images removed from one site, it may be difficult or impossible to get them completely off the Internet altogether.
All too often treated as a joke, or overlooked as a mild issue, revenge porn in reality is a crime. However, while images that end up on revenge porn sites are almost certainly originally intended to be private, in some instances the women themselves took photos and shared them willingly, or the partners took the photos with the woman’s permission. Mobile phones with cameras are now ubiquitous and so is the Internet. A McAfee study (in the US) found that 36 per cent of people have sent or intend to send intimate content to their partners, and that one in ten ex-partners threatened to expose those photos online – a threat carried out 60 per cent of the time.
Because we live in an era of technology and fast communication, this is becoming an entrenched part of culture of sex and relationships, a practice engaged in by huge numbers of people. Further, the problem is much wider than of one victim and one perpetrator.
There are trolls who spread the images of people they don’t know to embarrass them or just “for kicks.” And the websites are dedicated to earn money from the sharing of revenge pornography and hold no responsibility for what users post.
One of the biggest issues with revenge porn in the overwhelming reaction that the victim is somehow to blame. Time and time again you hear comments about “naive young women” who really should have known better than to send nude photos in the first place. “She got what was coming for her,” is another reaction I’ve heard time and time again. It’s a complicated issue, but once again, consensually sharing nude photos via phone or Internet with one person, does not mean that there was ever consent given to share them with anyone else. People who participate in creating private sexual images generally do so in the safe space that is an intimate relationship.
They may consent to taking the image – but not to spreading it. It is particularly victimizing to have something given in intimacy used as a weapon against you. Some women have lost their jobs or experienced depression and even committed suicide. Recently a woman in India ended her life after her rape video was posted online.
Women whose intimate sexual photos are shared without their consent often feel violated and ashamed. They are often blamed for letting the pictures be taken in the first place and suffer psychological distress and damage to relationships with friends and family. The victims report being harassed and stalked by people who have seen their images online. Once these images spread it can be very difficult to get them down from every site so victims have to face living with them forever.
The law now makes it illegal to disclose a “private sexual photograph or film” without the consent of the person depicted in the content. Last year a new law has came into effect in Canada which amends the Criminal Code, the Canada Evidence Act, the Competition Act, and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act. This law applies to people of all ages and unauthorized distribution and publication of intimate photos.
It defines an intimate image as being one in which the subject is nude, partially nude, or engaged in explicit sexual activity. Even posting images of a couple kissing may also land the poster in trouble if a judge felt the couple had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Reposting intimate photos of someone may also cause trouble for the Internet user as it may be clear the person(s) in the image did not give consent. Depending on the nature of the crime, an indictable offence (serious) could result in a prison term of up to five years, while a summary conviction (less serious) can result in up to six months in jail and up to $5,000 in fines.
England, Wales and the US all have similar laws to Canada. Currently, 34 states in the US have revenge porn laws.
